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What About Parents?

If kindergarten teachers matter as much as this new research suggests, then you would think that parents would have a large influence on their children’s adult outcomes. After all, you spend a lot more time with your parents than in your kindergarten class. But much research in behavioral genetics finds very little evidence for significant parental effects.

The general point here is an important one. As more and more education data is collected and more research is done — both of which are happening, fortunately — we may discover the impact of a good teacher is not as large as some economists now believe. Instead, we may realize that teachers matter, perhaps greatly, but that some of the gains we’re now attributing to them should in fact be attributed to other forces.

As it is, Raj Chetty, one of the economists who did the kindergarten study, notes that the effect that teachers have on their students may be significant, but it’s also small relative to all of the other forces affecting earnings. “A better class leads to higher average earnings, but there’s lots of variation around the mean,” he e-mailed me. “A lot of other things matter.”

On Mr. Mankiw’s specific point, though, not all economists have the same view of the research on parents that he does. Bruce Sacerdote at Dartmouth has done one of the most-cited studies, and it finds that parents can make an enormous difference. From the abstract:

I analyze a new set of data on Korean American adoptees who were quasi-randomly assigned to adoptive families. I find large effects on adoptees’ education, income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families. Parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics. Outcomes such as drinking, smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment.

Nathaniel Hilger, another researcher on the kindergarten team, argues that Mr. Sacerdote’s conclusions may be conservative, because the children in his study were not adopted until they were almost 1 1/2 on average. “Parents may also be important during this first stage of life,” Mr. Hilger wrote to me, “when the brain is still rapidly developing.”

Finally, Diane Schanzenbach of Northwestern, still another member of the team, points out that teachers can affect many more more children than parents — which is why good teachers can matter so much.

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Economics doesn't have to be complicated. It is the study of our lives — our jobs, our homes, our families and the little decisions we face every day. Here at Economix, journalists and economists analyze the news and use economics as a framework for thinking about the world. We welcome feedback, at economix@nytimes.com.